Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

Why Avaya is Embracing WebRTC in a Big Way

WebRTC is on the cusp of fundamentally changing the way people interact with one another on the Web. What’s remarkable is that so few consumers have ever heard of it.

In the near future, you might be shopping for clothing online when you get a prompt asking if you’d like to video chat with a fashion consultant live. Or you’re buying airline tickets when your browser crashes, erasing the transaction. When you return to that webpage, you might get a prompt inviting you to call someone in customer service through your browser.

This week, a handful of Avayans will take the stage to talk about the promise (and perils) of WebRTC, at the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif.

WebRTC is a new online standard being developed in tandem with HTML5. Its implications are far-reaching, said Val Matula, Avaya’s Senior Director of Multimedia Technologies, and one of the speakers at this week’s conference.

“It’s going to make voice and video much more common on the Internet,” Matula said. “You might say to yourself, ‘My goodness. Almost everyone has Skype today or Facetime. How could it be more common?’ … WebRTC makes it so easy to add your website that consumers will start to see it being used in all sorts of places.”

Researchers at Avaya are busy integrating the technology into the company’s existing suite of customer experience software, notably around online interactions.

Take for example, the ways WebRTC could improve an online store.

Web transactions are great when everything works according to plan. Consumers can log on 24 hours a day, browse their options, build an order and pay without ever interacting with a representative from the company.

What happens though, when a Web transaction fails? It’s estimated that 60- to 70 percent of consumers abandon their online shopping carts–a number of whom, no doubt, had a question about a product that an employee of the company could have answered.

Offering online customer service is one way companies could improve their shopping cart abandonment rates.

Matula predicts that once WebRTC becomes commonplace, consumers will demand interactive online customer experiences. That may prove a challenge for companies that require an enterprise-grade solution.

Software developers working with WebRTC are “going to find that they can get a demo or a simple application going very well,” Matula said. “But if they dig into the details, they’re going to want security, recording, compliance, etc. We’re going to see more people asking Avaya, ‘What do you have? Because I need the other things you can provide as well. I need your whole package in order to be successful.'”

Listen to my entire conversation with Dr. Matula below, and share your thoughts about WebRTC in the comments section. How do you see WebRTC impacting the enterprise?

Share

Related Articles:

Leveraging Big Data to Fine Tune Customer Experiences

Whether you realize it or not, big data is at the heart of practically everything we do today. Billboard companies, for example, are now leveraging eye tracking and traffic pattern analysis to gauge interest among drivers. Chances are one of those drivers owns a 4G-enabled vehicle that can track such things as performance and maintenance history. That person can also now record and analyze their utility usage via smart home solutions—anywhere, anytime. On a more critical level, doctors can now record and analyze patients’ heartbeats and breathing patterns to develop life-saving predictive algorithms.

In today’s smart, digital world, big data has opened the floodgates to never-before-seen possibilities. It has the power to course-correct potentially devastating outcomes, and it’s become a necessity for continually refining the customer experience. If you ask us, though, the best customer experiences today are supported by customer journey analytics.

The Need for Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics is a process that requires tracking and analyzing the way customers use a combination of available channels to interact with an organization. These channels range from human interaction (like speaking with a contact center agent) to fully automated interactions to assisted service (like live chat and co-browsing).

The need for customer journey analytics is simple: data solutions of the past simply won’t meet the next-generation customer needs of today and the future. Consider that just 10 years ago, channels like Web chat and social media were in their infancy (Facebook had only been around for two years). At the same time, the world’s first smartphone had only been on the market for one year. A lot has happened to transform the customer experience in a very short amount of time. As companies move forward in today’s age of rapid tech innovation, they must be armed with the right data strategy.

As mentioned, customers today use a vast number of channels and devices to interact with the brands they love. Each channel and device offers its own set of diverse scenarios for linking to other channels and devices, making no two customer experiences the same. Companies must be able to understand customers’ actions on any given channel or device in order to infer insights and create anticipatory engagement at the individual account level. For instance, why did one customer choose to purchase a product in a retail store verses online? Or, why did a customer end a live chat session before his or her inquiry was handled?

Making Customer Journey Analytics Work for You

Companies need a data-driven customer approach to survive—and it needs to be effective to thrive. Many companies, however, struggle with taking their customer data and turning it into actionable results. In fact, a 2015 study conducted by PwC found that 43% of companies obtain little tangible benefit from their data, while 23% derive no benefit whatsoever.

To effectively apply your data, you must first determine what you wish to achieve with your data in the first place. In other words, what key objectives do you hope to achieve or improve upon by using big data (or specifically, customer journey analytics)?

Not sure? Here are four core initiatives to start you on a path to maximize your customer journey analysis efforts:

Enable self-service.

Self-service options—especially mobile—are rapidly increasing in popularity. Just consider that in 2015, Apple users downloaded over 51,000 mobile apps per minute. Also last year, 90% of customers used their smartphones in stores to make price comparisons, research specific products, and check online reviews.

In today’s mobile-first world, businesses should leverage customer journey analytics to develop a sophisticated and integrated mobile experience—one that seamlessly integrates self service into their mobile app via visual, in-app self-service options. Conversely, this experience should offer customers callback options (either immediate or scheduled), as well as mobile chat (automated or agent-assisted) and video service. In addition to offering a stellar mobile UX, businesses should ensure backend capabilities that intelligently route customers to agents based on available context in order to drive relevant, meaningful interactions.

Improve resource matching. We live in a world today where cars can park themselves and doctors can 3D print new organs, yet we still struggle with routing callers to the right subject matter experts. The time for next-generation routing is now, and it all starts with improved resource matching—specifically, attribute-based matching. This means matching customers with agents based on rich context, business KPIs, and organizational goals across all work items, channels, and resources to drive segmentation, increase prioritization, and determine the best course of action per customer.

This also means choosing the right resources for each customer, regardless of where the resources reside within the organization. The right subject matter expert, for example, could be a contact center agent, a supervisor in your billing department, or your VP of sales. Customer journey analytics provides a 360-degree view of available resources organization-wide to support this level of attribute-based matching.

Increase agent awareness. Not only is it important to collect the right information, but it must also be presented in a way that is visually understandable and easily accessible for agents. Imagine, for example, an agent being able to see where a customer has been on the company’s website over the last month, as well as that person’s live chat interactions last week. Imagine an agent being able to quickly see that a customer sent an email two days ago regarding a recent bill, or reached out via SMS because the company’s mobile app wasn’t working properly. Imagine if agents could gain this 360-degree, comprehensive view all in just one or two clicks of a mouse.

Data is continuously generated in different ways, and is consumed by different people across different processes and applications. Having the right information at the right time empowers agents to focus on customers’ needs without having to ask for the same information multiple times (which, as we all know, is one of today’s greatest customer frustrations).

Ensure continuous improvement.

When it comes to big data, businesses can’t manage what they can’t measure. Therefore, it’s important that companies measure their data both in real-time and historically to help improve systems, processes, and applications over time. This is what will enable them to consistently deliver on key business objectives, operate within budget, and maximize every customer experience. Here are four key technologies for ensuring continuous improvement:

A data collector that can collect, standardize and normalize raw data across any data source so it can be used for enterprise-wide reporting and analytics.

A processing engine that can correlate, translate, calculate and publish normalized data into meaningful business measures.

A visual presentation platform that provides unified, real-time and historical reporting and analytics dashboards that can be used to visualize, analyze and explore key business measures.

Predictive analytics to discover new trends, apply changes based on insights, and continuously improve applications, workflows, self service and routing decisions.

So, how can you succeed with these four objectives to fine tune your customer experiences? That’s an entirely new discussion—however, we can tell you this: invest in a customer engagement platform that:

Today’s business environment is a competitive and dynamic landscape that necessitates innovation in communications and collaboration. Technology solutions are more than mere infrastructure investments, they are business success enablers. This has led to a major transformation in customer buying patterns. Customers have changed how they approach, purchase, and deploy ICT—information and communications technology–and we’ve changed how we sell to customers. Simply put, customers are requesting as much agility in their solutions and infrastructures as they require functionality, if not more.

Here at Avaya, we recognized several years ago that one size NEVER fits all. That’s why we made the strategic decision to transition to a software-and-services-led company providing solutions and platforms. To keep pace with customer buying patterns, we totally changed our product mix, made everything available as a software component, and gave our customers more flexibility in how they consume our solutions.

That last point reflects another major shift for Avaya—we put our customers first. That may sound self-evident, something all companies should be doing all the time, but it all too often doesn’t happen in the IT industry. It certainly wasn’t happening at Avaya. In 2011, our Net Promoter Score was hovering in the 20s, placing us … well, on par with most of our competitors, which is to say not very good. Today, we’re at 59, or Best in Class, which is in the 50% to 70% range with Apple and the Ritz Carlton.

So, putting the customer at the heart of everything we do has paid off for us big time. Consequently, our channel programmes have to evolve taking that new reality into consideration and that is exactly what we have done.

This month saw the global launch of Avaya Edge, our brand new and streamlined global partner programme, designed to give our partners the edge in the marketplace. Our vision for the new programme has three pillars:

Put the customer first

Protect and represent the Avaya brand

Be highly rewarding for the professionals and organisations that are a part of the programme, wherever they may be.

Avaya Edge also addresses some of the biggest needs for technology partnerships—a simpler structure, greater benefits, and flexibility—and builds them in as the key defining characteristics of the programme. To achieve that we gave our partners a choice to decide in which marketplace they would like to thrive, i.e., Enterprise or Mid-Market, since each of those segments require different level of profiles, skills and investments.

Here’s another way we’re bringing partners more closely into the fold. In previous years, we’ve hosted separate events for partners and customers around the globe. The partners had their own specialist Avaya Partner Forum event, while customers attended Avaya Technology Forums. Fair enough, specialization is not exactly a bad thing—but achieving the best possible outcome requires everybody pulling together in the same direction. The Avaya business teams, our partners (resellers, systems integrators, distributors, etc.) and, above all, our customers need to be aligned if we are all going to achieve our business objectives.

This month in Dubai, we’re hosting Avaya Engage—our first event that brings everybody in the Avaya ecosystem under one roof. Avaya executives will meet with partners, customers and industry leaders, giving everybody an equal opportunity to network, learn latest industry trends and understand where Avaya is going.

Make or Break: The Customer Experience Imperative for Midsize Businesses

According to the Wall Street Journal, 2016 Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales have already accounted for more than $3 Billion in “desktop spending”—aka, e-commerce. While many of these purchases are simply one click and a check off of gift lists, the customer probably made several decisions well before the submit-order button was activated. Whereas item and price have been the primary drivers of purchasing decisions, the customer experience is increasingly the new battleground.

We know that customers tend to repeat shop at places where both the self and assisted service is efficient and knowledgeable.

We know there is an expectation that they’ll be able to use mobile, desktop, voice channels—often all of them in the course of a transaction.

And we know that making them repeat information over and over is a black mark against the perceived experience.

Big companies can and are dedicating investments and resources to digital strategies focused on an elevated customer experience that checks all items on the list above. But if you’re a midsize business, is it even possible to break through the bulwark of expectations and large enterprise investments, and stand out from the crowd on customer experience alone?

At Avaya, we strongly believe the answer is a resounding YES! We are well aware that what goes on behind the scenes to coordinate the customer experience can be dauntingly complex. The latest release of Avaya IP Office Contact Center takes into account midsize businesses’ needs and requirements for simplicity and affordability, and the desire to deliver a top-notch customer experience.

Tips for Creating an Outstanding Customer Experience

Midsize businesses can ensure their customer experience sets them up for the kind of preferred vendor relationships that lead to profitability, growth, and long term customer loyalty.

Integrate Multichannel Customer Contact into Your Strategy

An overwhelming majority of customers expect organizations to offer different channels to meet their needs, and make it easy to do so (Marcus Hickman, The Autonomous Customer 2015). Avaya IP Office Contact Center enables a midsize business to offer web chat, email and voice as an integrated, multichannel customer interaction strategy.

Drive an Efficient Experience with Skills-Based RoutingIt doesn’t help to offer multiple channels if the channels are kept separate within the company. For example, web chat is a great way to capture the customer while they’re in the evaluation stage on a website and turn them into a buyer. But if the channel only goes to those handling web chat and not the best agent for the customer needs, you may end up with someone who’s more frustrated than satisfied.Avaya IP Office Contact Center can help companies optimize their multichannel strategy, providing voice, email and web chat and enabling skills-based routing that can get customer inquiries to agents who are best qualified to handle them, including choice of channel, expertise, and past experience with a particular inquiry or customer. This can create a much more efficient experience by increasing first contact resolutions, reducing interaction handling times, reducing or eliminating transfers to other agents, and reducing callbacks.

Drive More Efficiency by Letting Customers Serve Themselves

The preference to use self service is on the rise, and can be a money saver for the company and a time saver for the customer. For those that call in, an interactive voice response (IVR) can greet and direct callers, allowing them to use speech recognition or their touch tone keypad to get answers to common questions. This may quickly resolve issues without involving live assistance, or if needed, quickly get the customer to the right agent.

Narrow the Gap by Using Agent Downtime More Efficiently

Undoubtedly, there are times when incoming interactions are slow. This is a perfect opportunity to automatically start outbound or proactive marketing campaigns and fill in the gaps between peak times and seasons. With Avaya IP Office Contact Center agents can use predefined scripts during outbound call campaigns to help increase sales revenue and upsell opportunities, to reduce accounts receivable backlog, or generate sales appointments for field sales.

Your CRM system can be a tremendous boost to contact center agent productivity by simply linking one platform to another. Now, agents don’t need to search for customer details or create activity records—it’s all in one place. From here they can click to dial or email from customer records, greet customers by name, and quickly access relevant information for more personalized, well informed customer interactions.

Look Back to Go Forward: Measure to Identify and Pursue Improvement Opportunities

Companies need to determine what success looks like to understand if they’re on the right path. For the contact center, KPIs should be outlined by an agreement on what’s important to the business. Metrics such as new customer acquisitions, new and repeat sales, debt collected, or sales appointments made can be good starting places from which you establish a benchmark to chart future progress. Contact centers may also want to measure some of the more traditional indicators such as number of interactions handled, number of first contact resolutions, wait time, etc. And here’s a strong tip: Tout your customer experience metric successes to demonstrate the positive impact your contact center is having on the overall business.

If you’re an Avaya IP Office company and not already using IP Office Contact Center, make a New Year’s resolution to check out all it can do for you to make the next peak season one that breaks records—not backs.

Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.